LinkedIn is an illustrious website that helps professionals connect with one another. It is also a portal for people to display their skills as well as the path that their career has taken through the years. It contains a variety of information ranging from education, knowledge to checkpoints in their career.
Employers also use this platform for recruiting professionals. So it is a useful tool which is slowly becoming a necessity for people entering into the corporate world. Navigation and understanding crucial skills for their profession of choice and the location they would flourish goes a long way in crafting a successful career.
The World Bank Group - Linkedin Digital Data for Development1 attempts to harness LinkedIn data covering more than 100 countries. For the purpose of this report the following datasets will be accessed:
The above excel sheets will be utilized for charting trends based on industry skills, migration of talent across the globe and global employment growth statistics.
The report will be charting the trends in LinkedIn across all fields. It will be delving into the kind of skills that are gaining or losing popularity across different verticals as well as what the top few must have skills are for all working professionals.
The other useful component for young professionals is what the migration trends are with respect to their skills and which place would give them space to learn and display their potential.
The final aspect but supremely important one is whether the global employment trends are conducive to their growth. Only upon knowing this aspect is it possible for them to decide whether migration is a good option or upskilling is necessary.
In order to analyse the different skill categories by vertical the excel sheet for industry skill needs has to be used. Upon importing this data the below steps must be taken to generate 4.1:
Figure 4.1: Trend of skill categories across the different verticals by year
In order to analyse the top 10 useful skills on LinkedIn by year, the excel sheet for industry skill needs has to be used. Upon importing this data the below steps must be taken to generate 4.2:
Figure 4.2: Trend in change of useful skills across occupations
To analysis the global trend of employment growth, the growth rate from 2015-2019 was taken to see the rate changed over the years as shown below in Figure 4.3.
Figure 4.3: Global trend of employment grwoth from 2015-2019
Based on Figure 4.3, it is found that the employment growth rate in high income areas such as the USA, European countries and Australia were slowing down. However, the other income groups had an increasing trend on the growth rate. Further details will be elaborated in the next section.
In order to analysis the further development of the trend, the growth rate is separated in different income groups and industries as shown in Figure 4.4:
Figure 4.4: Trend of employment growth rate based on industries
Based on Figure 4.4, the high income group had a downwards slope on employment growth rate whereas the other groups had an increasing trends. The reasons are as follow:
The low oil price had delayed the interest rate hikes in the high income countries. However, it has brought opportunities to oil importing countries like India and China, which lowered the production cost and increased the competitive of the products produced.2 This slowed down the development in high income countries meanwhile swapped the chances to the other income groups.
The political disputes threatened the global growth. For example, the “Trade wars” between China and the USA had brought chaos to the global market which badly affect the global economy. This eventually shrank the employment growth.3
After examining 4.1, the below highlights were taken note of: - Soft skills are the one set of skills that people have increasingly found need for across all the verticals. - Business skills are finding less and less takers by the year. - Specialized industry skills seem to have seen volatility as they were in decline up until 2017-2018 but with the arrival of 2019 they saw a significant boost in demand. - Disruptive technological skills do not seem to have caught on yet except for the Information and Communication segment. - Mining and Quarrying have seen no disruptive tech skills growth whatsoever. - Despite fintech4 sweeping across the world, among the people employed in the field of financial and insurance activities little to no technical skills seem to be visible.
After examining 4.2, the below highlights were taken note of:
| Category of Skill | Number of times it occurs in top 10 |
|---|---|
| Business Skills | 5 |
| Soft Skills | 4 |
| Specialized Industry Skills | 2 |
| Tech Skills | 3 |
| Industry Name | Average Persentage of Growth |
|---|---|
| Venture Capital & Private Equity | 3.584088 |
| Alternative Dispute Resolution | 2.462249 |
| Computer & Network Security | 2.097874 |
| Renewables & Environment | 2.069448 |
| Aviation & Aerospace | 1.673296 |
Based on Table 5.2, it is found that venture capital & private equity industry, which catalyzed technological innovation, had the highest average growth between 2015-2019. The possible reason is that the new rapid boom in information technology industry required great amount of capital investment, which boost the growth in these industries.
| Industry Name | Average Percentage of Growth |
|---|---|
| Newspapers | -2.103078 |
| Accounting | -2.074900 |
| Market Research | -1.822482 |
| Outsourcing/Offshoring | -1.798203 |
| Telecommunications | -1.538015 |
According to Table 5.3, the traditional media like newspapers, telecommunications,etc had the higher recession from 2015-2019. It is because of the great boom in social media and social network. People tend to watch the news online and communicate on social media apps which had shrank the development in traditional media.
Professionals in today’s day and time are always looking for opportunities to grow in terms of their career. There are multiple aspects to this growth and the environment needed to enrich the growth.
Skills are front and center in terms of must-haves for a fruitful career. From the analysis it is clear that soft skills are a necessity regardless of vertical. Business skills have no longer remained the mainstay that they used to be and tech skills are here to stay however their disruptiveness in every sector is up for debate.
As one chooses to upskill, they find it harder to stay stationary within their old environment and migrate to greener pastures. From above trends it is observed that hard skills like Data Driven Analytics, Fintech, Nanotechnology and soft skills like Persuasion has seen an upward trend in terms of skill gain due to migration. This can be credited to expanding technology and the growing stock markets and startup culture looking at the Venture Capital and Private Equity industry trend.
However we also need to consider whether the current economy is at the state where such activities are possible and employment growth would directly relate to whether the upskilling has to do with retaining jobs or switching them out. The Information and communication sector has a rapid boom in recent years which indicates that there are larger demand of labor whereas the recession in traditional media and communications sectors cause more and more labor being laid off.
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